hacking x for y

hacking x for y in Technology

[ITS] Ritual phrasing of part of the information which ITS made publicly available about each user. This information (the INQUIR record) was a sort of form in which the user could fill out various fields. On display, two of these fields were always combined into a project description of the form "Hacking X for Y" (e.g. ""Hacking perceptrons for Minsky""). This form of description became traditional and has since been carried over to other systems with more general facilities for self-advertisement (such as Unix plan files). [Jargon File]